Pageviews are no longer king when it comes to measuring website and content performance—if they ever truly were a useful metric at all. More and more advertisers, marketers, and publishers have begun to realize that without actual conversion, views mean very little when it comes to monetizing content. There may have been a time when the availability of content was less ubiquitous and a certain number of views could be counted on to coincide with conversions—but that ship has, for the most part, sailed.

Today, those who are working with content monetization, online sales, and online publishing of all types are aware of the fact that marketing must be done in a careful, calculated manner in order to capture the attention of today’s information inundated consumer base. This might sound as if it goes without saying, but it needs to be said because so many advertisers are still clinging to traditional display ads, which simply aren’t effective. Some estimates claim that the average internet user is served 1,700 banner ads on a monthly basis. How many banner ads do you, the reader, remember seeing over the past month? How many of those brand names do you remember? read more

The Online Publishers Association (OPA) announced a new initiative designed to help stimulate creative advertising on the Internet that meets the needs of marketers. With the announcement comes the commitment from a group of OPA members to implement new interactive and display advertising units across their websites.

The proposed new advertising units are:

The Fixed Panel (recommended dimension is 336 wide x 860 tall), which looks naturally embedded into the page layout and scrolls to the top and bottom of the page as a user scrolls.